


when you're an animal

by mornen



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Angst, Gen, Home, Starvation, reflections
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25557256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mornen/pseuds/mornen
Summary: Kite prepares to return 'home' to search for clues for Ging's whereabouts.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	when you're an animal

Kite has a list of things he can never tell anyone on the notes app on his phone right next to his grocery lists. Lots of things hidden behind a four digit passcode. (5483.) Maybe someone will unlock the list someday and say, ‘hey, Kite, I can’t love you anymore.’ But it isn’t likely, and who is there to stop loving him anyway, so he keeps the list. 

He pauses in the unfamiliar aisle of the grocery store, scrolling through the list (damnation list, not grocery). He flips back to the grocery list and finds cherries to add to his basket. 

Sometimes he can taste the poison in cherries. In the flesh, not the pit. Taste the poison in the pit, and you could die. Sometimes still he can taste the bitterness of the poison in the sweetness of the flesh. Or maybe he just imagines it. His fingers brush over the green husks of corn. He doesn’t like to eat corn, but he likes how the kernels feel beneath the layers of leaves, and he likes the sweetness of their smell. 

He gets grilled chicken and wrap dumplings and two bottles of green tea. He takes it all back to the hotel. His nail catches on the key as he pulls it from his bag, but it doesn’t break. His nails haven’t broken in so long now, but he still imagines they will every time. 

For a moment, he sees Ging on the bed, maps strewn about him, groaning about people, but he blinks, and Ging is gone. Never there. He was just imagining. (Like he imagines the poison in the cherries’ flesh?) 

He puts the food down on the round table and takes the cherries to the bathroom sink to wash. He brings them back and eats his dinner: half the chicken, half the dumplings, half the cherries, one bottle of tea. He puts the rest of the food in the tiny fridge for breakfast tomorrow, the same meal as tonight, but cold. 

He strips and gets into bed naked. He stares at his packed bag on the chair. (Never unpacked.) He stares at his unbroken nails. He stares out the window at the brick building across the street. In one of the rooms, a woman plays a cello. 

It’s eight pm. He’s waking up early to go on. Look for Ging. Look for anything. Sometimes he imagines just dropping the whole thing. He could just walk away. Sell Ging’s licence. Buy a fucking nice place somewhere really, really stupidly fucking nice. Settle down forever and break his phone. Buy a new one. Never again write a damnation list. 

Play an eccentric billionaire. Become a beloved philanthropist. Invent a new backstory for everyone who asked until he was the mystery of the city, the talk of the town. He could do it. Get away with it. Get a house somewhere and pretend for the rest of his life that he really belonged. 

(Occupation: rich. Place of residence: here.) 

Unless Ging decided to turn up one day and kill him in his sleep for the theft. It’s possible. Ging’s unpredictable. He likes to think he wouldn’t, but maybe they wouldn’t be friends anymore. Are they friends? Do friends just leave? He hasn’t had any before so he’s not the one to answer.

But also, Ging might just never care. He gave Kite the licence anyway. But he could just drop it someday and never think about it again. Say that’s it I’m done. I don’t want this. Drop it on the street and change someone’s life forever. Drop it in the forest and never again have to feel the weight of it. It’s not heavy, but it drags him down like a millstone. 

Or maybe he wants it. Of course he wants it. He wants to prove himself, doesn’t he? Prove his worth to the only person who ever thought he had any. 

‘You wanted it so bad, so here,’ Ging said when he handed over the licence. ‘You can have it now.’ 

Kite took it, and it felt exactly the same as when he’d swiped it from Ging’s pocket those years ago when his every single fingernail was broken and Ging had said, ‘hey, I think you’re worth saving.’ (Not in so many words.) 

He should go to Ging’s home. (Is it a home anymore if you never go back?) He feels his chest tightening around his heart. His ticket is in his bag, and he can’t sleep because it’s burning a hole in the room. 

The ticket’s not to Ging’s home. It’s to his. If you can call the place he starved and died and died and died (but didn’t die) a home. He’s going to walk the fucking streets he never got to walk because he didn’t belong in the city, just in the slums. And he’ll have shoes. And he won’t wear rags. And none of his fingernails will be broken. And maybe Ging will have left a clue to this game there because that’s where they met, so maybe that means something to him. 

Kite touches his neck. His scar aches more than it ever has before, but maybe he’s just imagining.


End file.
